1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a warehouse managing system which automatically manages a procedure from arrival of articles at a warehouse to their delivery therefrom to reduce use of paper.
2. Description of Prior Art
There has existed an automatic warehouse which receives and ships articles according to a schedule. The automatic warehouse determines in detail how to store the articles, and how to move or ship the articles in order. Also, the automatic warehouse is provided with a variety of tools such as a lifter, a lift truck, and a conveyer, thus moving and shipping the articles efficiently. The automatic warehouse requires a large amount of equipment cost. On the other hand, the automatic warehouse, in general, has many shelves, wherein operators receive, move, and ship the articles to/between/from the shelves, for example, using lifters with reference to slips.
FIG. 1 shows a flow of articles in a general warehouse. As shown in the diagram, for example, once received, the several articles 1 are identified referring to a slip through checking of their article name and their quantity. Once received, the articles 1 are piled up on the preselected shelves 3 in the warehouse 2. Thereafter, some checking such as storage place checking, freshness checking, and quantity checking, are carried out referring to the slip.
To determine the number of articles 1 remaining in the warehouse 2, an inventory is taken periodically. To avoid reducing of the freshness of the articles 1, the shipment is carried out in such a fashion that an earlier received article 1 is earlier shipped (i.e., first-in, first-out). In this way, the truck 4 delivers the articles 1 to customers such as wholesalers and retailers.
Incidentally, in the above conventional warehouse, if the articles are stored in wrong storage places, the warehouse management such as receiving purchase orders and maintaining article freshness does not work. In addition, since in general, the inventory involves much manpower, warehouse operation such as receiving, storing, moving, and shipping the articles, are not efficiently performed during the inventory.
Further, determination of the quantity and the destination for the articles 1, and operation such as picking up and delivering the articles 1 are performed in article shipment. Such determination and operation requires complex knowledge and experience, and may induce some mistakes. Also, storing the received articles 1 in the preselected places makes it difficult to simultaneously store some received articles more than usual and other received articles less than usual.
Moreover, in general, counting up stacked small articles such as parts, paper, and books is difficult. More definitely, for example, the following are commonly used: (1) weighing papers using a scale, and converting the weight into a numerical quantity; and (2) taking out a part of a box containing a plurality of parts, weighing the part, weighing the parts in total, and estimating the number of the parts based upon the weight of one part. These operations, however, are rather difficult to operators, which might result in some input errors or calculation errors. That is to say, these operations impede accurate management of warehousing.
Further, allocating some trucks and assigning a variety of and a large number of articles thereto with reference to several slips is extremely difficult for even skilled operators. For this reason, there has been developed some computer systems which are capable of calculating the amount of those articles based upon the slips by destination of the trucks, thus assisting the operators. Rearranging assignment of the articles to the trucks in detail sometimes requires replacing and changing data on the trucks, the articles, and the destination, being troublesome to impede reduction of operation time. Further, once picked up from the warehouse, the articles are packed into some conveyance boxes each directed to a destination for delivery. Accordingly, to each store, several conveyance boxes are delivered with some contents list indicative of information on the articles. After unpacking the conveyance boxes, the clerk in a store checks the quantity of the articles contained therein looking at the list. Checking the articles with reference to the lists is extremely difficult, which might burden the operator with many jobs in case of delivery of a great number of articles. In particular, prior to checking quantity of the articles, it is necessary to unpack the conveyance boxes and to confirm whether or not the articles correspond to the article order, which makes receipt operation of articles extremely complicated.
Further, conventionally, in case of delivery of a large number of articles to a department store or a supermarket, the clerks working therein have checked and arranged the articles to attach tags thereto. Attaching the tags to the articles employs a labeler. The labeler prints tags showing prices of the articles to let them out one by another for the purpose of attaching them on the articles. In arranging the articles on the shelves, each clerk puts on the articles the tags corresponding thereto using the labeler.
In such a tag processing system, to make the labeler print prices on articles, the clerks manually inputs the prices to the labeler, thus starting to put price tags on the articles. However, if a clerk causes an error in checking the types of the articles or inputting the prices, wrong price tags are put on the articles. Besides, putting on a great number of articles the corresponding price tags must involve many clerks and many labelers, which increases jobs of the clerks and makes management of the labelers complicated.
Further, to pick up and deliver articles from the warehouse according to article orders made by customers, some instructions are prepared. The instructions show names and quantities of the articles. Warehousing is required to ship the articles in such a fashion that older articles are scheduled to be shipped earlier than new ones, in general, which is referred to as first-in & first-out management.
In particular, for articles which are easy to be decayed with time, it is essential to clarify articles to be picked up according to the shipment instructions. Accordingly, automated warehouses manage the names, quantities, and manufacturing dates of the articles for such first-in & first-out management.
Incidentally, some conventional warehouses are attempting to instantly indicate receipt and shipment of articles, which arise frequently, more definitely, articles to be stored after the receipt of shipment. For example, however, the shipment instructions for shipment of the articles is prepared on the basis of stock information upon receipt of article orders from the customer, which sometimes makes it impossible to actually ship the articles at the present time because the articles have been shipped. This is due to the time lag between the time of preparing shipment instructions and the time of actually shipping. This requires preparing for other shipment instructions, which makes shipment operations complicated.